Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Leesburg Town Council held a work session on October 5, 2026, in the Council Chamber at Town Hall. The meeting focused on two primary agenda items: the Fiscal Year 2028 budget outlook and a continued deep dive discussion on the Zoning Ordinance Rewrite, specifically addressing Article II zoning districts and dimensional standards. Council members received presentations from staff, deliberated on key policy issues, and reached several decisions via informal consensus votes.
Presentation by Owen Snyder and Tamara Keesecker (General Fund):
Presentation by Amy Wykes (Utilities Fund):
James David presented the continued work session on the zoning rewrite, focusing on items from the dive list related to Article II and the draft zoning map. Council members discussed and voted on several topics.
Housing Mix Requirements:
Minimum Community Amenities and Open Space:
Downtown Building Height:
Downtown Multifamily Units by Right:
Downtown Parking Alternatives:
Fence Height in Residential Historic District:
Zoning Map Changes:
Future Agenda:
I would like to open open tonight's town council work session. Um, our first item for discussion is the fiscal year 2028 budget work session. Is it correct that you were asking for additional time? Yes, ma'am. How much time do you anticipate you? I'm right about seven minutes, but if you give me 10, I'll try my best to return three of them to you. And then Amy would like 10 minutes. Okay, is everybody okay if we increase it by 20 minutes? Okay. Good evening, Madam Mayor and members of council. Tonight, as the mayor mentioned, we're here for our first fiscal year 2028 budget work session. A number of topics on the agenda tonight include the preliminary results for fiscal year 2026, much the same conversation that we had a few weeks ago. Also just a recap of how we use the fiscal year 26 data center computer equipment tax revenue, followed by a recap of the 27 adopted budget and a brief outlook for fiscal year 2028. Once we've gone through that, we'll open it up for a brief QA to the extent that you're interested in that, and then Amy will present on the utilities fund outlook. So again, diving into fiscal year 2026 preliminary unaudited results. Just reminder that the fiscal year 26 adopted budget did have several programmed uses of reserves. This is common, and typically we outperform and do not need to use those reserves. That's a result of better revenue performance as we talked about a few weeks ago, as well as expenditure savings on the other side of the equation. So you've received 12.1 million dollars net between fiscal 25 and 26. You've programmed that for a number of different things, including stormwater operations, the purchase of Rock Spring Farm, pavement management, and for your boards and commissions. Again, that was for the pavement as well as stormwater, and then about 0.6 million dollars for the inclement weather reserve. The FY27 budget also included a number of enhancements, including the police lieutenant and police co-responder, as well as an assistant town manager for labor relations. And then, as again, I mentioned a few minutes ago, the additional money for the pavement management program. In terms of the outlook for fiscal year 2028, we do want to highlight that there is a weaker economic outlook for Loudoun County Gross County product for 26 to 28 based on the forecast that Loudoin County's budget office presented to the Board of Supervisors back in July. Last year at this time, that forecast was about 4% annual growth for 26 and 27. The current forecast for the next three years is for annual growth to be between 2.8 and 3.4%. In contrast, 2024, the growth was 4.1%, and then in 2025, it was just 2.5%. You can also see from this chart the increasing inflationary impacts that really started around March of 2026. On the employment side, we did see declining levels of employment during 2025. That's the most recent year of data available. It decreased 0.9%, which left 2025 levels, which are shown in these blue bars here, which look kind of black up there, actually lower than the 2023 level. So a fewer number of people employed during 2025 than in 24. On the other side, that orange line represents the unemployment rate, and you can see that increasing since uh post-COVID time frames. As of July of 2020, that's a typo from this morning, 2026. The unemployment rate for Louden was 3.6%. The state was just above us at 3.7%, and the nation national unemployment rate was 4.1%. Turning to the housing market, this slide is intended to just be a snapshot in time. We did a similar snapshot last year comparing August to August. So this slide just compares August of 26 sales data to August of 25. You can see the number of active listings increased 18%, going from 771 listings to just over 900. That's likely being driven by the fact that there are fewer units sold. So number of units sold decreased 17%, going from 520 down to 432. Along with that declining number of homes sold, we're also see a slowing in the in the growth of the average sales price. So while it's still higher than it was in August of 2025, it's not at the same pace that we've seen it for the past several fiscal years. This year, August to August, sales prices are only up one percent. In terms of the days on the market, that's been pretty stable, 23 or 24 days compared to 23 days last year. Taking that in terms of the town's revenue outlook for 2028, non-property taxes account for 38% of the current year's general fund budget.